


Only the Blood

by Hannigrammatic



Series: The Wolf and the Artist [1]
Category: Blood and Chocolate (2007), Charlie Countryman (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe, First Meetings, M/M, Werewolf!Nigel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-26
Updated: 2015-11-26
Packaged: 2018-05-03 13:27:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,218
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5292788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannigrammatic/pseuds/Hannigrammatic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“I saw you here yesterday,” Aiden spoke as he worked. “I wanted approach you but you looked like you would have bitten me.”</i>
</p><p> </p><p>  <i>“And I didn’t look that way today?” Nigel asked curiously, not moving an inch.</i></p><p> </p><p>  <i>“Less bitey and more glarey,” the artist said with a shrug. “I decided to risk it today.”</i></p><p> </p><p>Nigel meets Aiden and finds himself very interested indeed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Only the Blood

**Author's Note:**

> Rewrote this! Didn't like the first go at it, I wasn't comfortable or in my zen with the characters. Now I am and I like this MUCH better.
> 
> All mistakes are mine~

The cafe was crowded with the lunch rush, voices murmuring at a constant buzz that was just on the cusp of being annoying. Nigel sat outside with a steaming paper cup of coffee, a lit cigarette sitting betwixt full lips.

The loup-garoux was generally awake much earlier, the animal that he was at his core used to rising with sun and setting out for the hunt. But modern times called for restraint and hiding, and it resulted in a laziness his kind hadn’t seen until recent centuries. It was a grievance, but he wasn’t as bothered by it as some of the others. Like the younger wolves, Nigel had a penchant for partying and imbibing alcohol by the litre, able to hold his liquor much better than a human, but unlike the pups, it didn’t stir him into restlessness or boisterousness. With enough, he could manage a pleasant buzz, with more than enough he could relax his limbs. Mostly, though, everyone in the cloying clubs he spent his nights at smelled like a converging mass of delicious blood and pink, delectable organs, and it became a tantalizing game of teasing himself, the wolf in sheep’s skin.

Honestly, more than anything, Nigel found himself fucking bored out of his mind. But that was a life for a loup-garoux of any standing now. Lips closed on a secret humanity would bust over.

Taking a sip of the scalding beverage, Nigel flicked his ciggie at the simple ashtray on table before him. Last night had been one of many spent tossing back shots and grinding against a supple ass on the dance floor to the beat of the electro-rock thumping over the speakers. One of many passing the time between hunts, when he could finally let loose the wolf, let go of the tension that built up as he hid in the shadows of humankind. It was enough, for now. Never satisfactory, only always _just_ enough, the special gathering for the loup-garoux when they could shift freely and run, feel the wind through fur and the ground beneath paws.

For Nigel, the hunt was the only thing that excited him anymore; would that it could happen more often. As it were, lately it did less than more. After all, how could they hunt their enemies if no one knew they existed? Nigel exhaled smoke through his nose and grunted as he shifted in his chair. Fucking Bucharest. Fucking pack. Fucking rules and parameters and secrets. It all made his teeth fucking itch.

“Sometimes ashtrays offend me, too,” a voice suddenly interrupted Nigel’s afternoon musing, and he blinked as he tilted his head.

A man sprawled comfortably into the chair across from him. Young, early twenties, maybe, he was gently tanned and had boyish features. He was lean and his curly hair stood on end as he set delicate-looking fingers onto the table to tap a rhythm out as he looked across it at Nigel with blue eyes narrowed in mirth.

“The fuck are you?” Nigel grunted.

“I’m Aiden, great to meet you,” the man extended his other hand pertly, and Nigel stared at it unblinking.

“Fuck off,” the wolf said.

Relevant to the man’s words, Nigel had been glaring something fierce at the ashtray as his thoughts strayed. It had less to do with anger and more to do with his resting face, pale brows often scrunched in a frown, lips finding themselves in the beginning of a perpetual snarl. He narrowed brown eyes at the hand that remained extended regardless of his profane command.

“You don’t need to be rude,” the soft voice had an amused undertone to it, and Nigel’s eyes narrowed further as he crushed the remains of his ciggie in the tray.

Licking his lower lip, he flitted his eyes between the young man’s blue ones and his outstretched hand, and then finally reached across and grasped it when it became apparent that Aiden wasn’t going anywhere. The youth firmly shook his larger hand with white teeth bared in a cheeky grin, completely unconcerned that he was now the one being glared at.

“See, not so hard now, was it?” Aiden winked as he pulled his hand back, and Nigel felt his guts tighten at this brat’s attitude.

“What do you fucking want, kid?” he grumbled, almost growled as the youth kicked his feet up on the table and made himself comfortable.

“I want to draw you,” Aiden explained with another bright grin.

“You fucking what?” Nigel felt his patience bleeding out of him, but beneath that he also felt a faint perk of interest stir languidly from its deep slumber.

Here was a kid that had no clue what he was, who had approached him even so as if he were a kind old lady. Considering Nigel stood at an even six feet with wide shoulders and corded, rippling muscles barely contained by his button down and slacks, it wasn’t exactly a common thing for someone to encroach upon him. Even intoxicated and less likely to stare someone down, Nigel carried himself with a very obvious air of fuckoffery. He had to give Aiden props for his audacity.

“I want you to sit still while I sketch you,” the younger man elaborated. “You have a very unique aura.”

Nigel blinked again, staring silently at the kid, taking in the words but not sure he was understanding them correctly. If anyone wanted anything of him, it generally involved violence, sex, or drugs, sometimes all three at once.

“Or you could just fuck off,” he said, though there was no bite to it - he found himself growing more intrigued despite himself.

“I could, but I could also not,” another wink, and Aiden was digging into the messenger bag at his side.

Sketchbook, pencil, and eraser dropped onto the table with soft thumps each, and Aiden’s feet returned to the cobble street as he flipped to a fresh page. His tongue poked out at the corner of his lips, and he proceeded to sketch Nigel as the older man sat there in mild disbelief. The brat had actually been serious, brushing off Nigel’s brusqueness with nary a care in the world. But as he observed Aiden in his work, the wolf settled, and he finally accepted the curiosity unfurling itself against the cage that constant boredom had erected. Something new and unpredictable, soft and small - and Aiden was all of those, some more than the other.

“Can you tilt your head a tiny bit more, please?” the artist requested without looking up.

Nigel tilted his head a few inches wordlessly, content to humor the youth. He didn’t look away, though, instead taking in the features that looked younger than his age likely was, nose a straight, short slope, sparse facial hair over his lip and along his square jawline. His brows were expressive, scrunched in concentration at the moment, and blue eyes were almond-shaped and just now narrowed up at Nigel as he worked his pencil with soft _scritch scritch_ sounds.

“I saw you here yesterday,” Aiden spoke as he worked. “I wanted approach you but you looked like you would have bitten me.”

“And I didn’t look that way today?” Nigel asked curiously, not moving an inch.

“Less bitey and more glarey,” the artist said with a shrug. “I decided to risk it today.”

Snorting, Nigel found himself genuinely amused. He couldn’t see how the sketch was coming along thanks to the angle Aiden had the sketchbook at, raised gently as he pressed his body nearer to the table in a position that brought him closer to the paper. Blue eyes flitted up at him here and there, pink tongue flashing as he drew it along his bottom lip. They were both silent for several long moments, and it was only then that Nigel realized he had drowned out everything going on about them. The jingle of the bell above the cafe door in constant array, the buzz of never ending conversation, the city sounds around them, they were faded out until all his sensitive ears could be bothered to hear were the gentle exhalations and the relaxed heartbeat of the young man across the table.

“You can move,” the soft voice assured him. “I’ve got the sketch down. I just need to flesh it out now.”

Nigel grunted noncommittally. He did move, however, reaching into his shirt pocket to pluck out another cigarette, which he lit after digging out his lighter. Setting it between his lips, he took a long drag before blowing smoke out into the air between them casually. The lighter he set onto the table with a click, and he nudged it around in a circle as he observed the artist. The young man no longer looked up as often as he worked, slouching further in the chair until his nose nearly touched the end of his pencil, but when he did, finally, Nigel made sure to catch his gaze and hold it, feeling his curiosity reach its peak.

Not bored anymore, it seemed, and not much could catch his attention these days, not seriously at least. But Aiden had an effortless stubbornness about him that Nigel often imagined himself possessing. That alone was enough to stir the wolf into prowling.

What really sealed the deal though, was the blush that peppered boyish cheeks under the prolonged scrutiny, as the wolf stared unblinking from behind tendrils of smoke.

That, and the blue eyes drawing dark as pupils dilated.

Nigel was more than interested now.

“I’m finished,” that soft voice announced. “Thank you for your time.”

And in a flutter, Aiden was returning his supplies to his bag, standing and securing it at his side. But he held out his hand again, smile bowing red lips when Nigel didn’t hesitate to clasp it in return this time. Impossibly smooth, like silk, the wolf thought, and he tightened his grip imperceptibly just to watch azure orbs widen marginally. Nigel could imagine his teeth sinking into something so very helpless, at the throat preferably.

Aiden walked away with a jaunty wave and a last, good-humored wink.

∞

The next time Nigel saw Aiden other than in passing, he was kicking the shit out of three men. He’d heard the fighting sounds two blocks from the cafe, up at mid-morning instead of noon, sucking on a ciggie as he sat at the same spot, a favored one other customers knew to avoid now, lest they find him glaring down at them with a curled lip. He was turning the thought over in his head that he wouldn’t mind if the little creature sketched him more often, the deer he likened Aiden to be in his mind after their first meeting. A week had passed since that day, but Nigel caught sight of dark curls and white sneakers and casual clothes often, now that he knew what to look for.

Always a hot chocolate, sipped between bouts of scratching away at the paper before him. Sometimes he sat at a table in clear site, a whole slew of shit spread on the table in front of him. Copic markers, water colors, pens and pencils and charcoal, and papers, often so many that one got free and fluttered in the wind teasingly. But he always retrieved it, battened it down in a folder or shoved it under a book. Nigel drank his coffee and smoked his cigarettes and watched the artist. He wondered how long Aiden had been frequenting this cafe before he noticed the glaring man tucked into the corner outside, always at the smallest round table next to the latticed fence that housed the seating area.

Sometimes Nigel saw the exact moment when Aiden caught his eye across the cobbled walkway and through the weaving crowds of people.

Leaning against the wall now, Nigel found himself wondering if perhaps the deer was a lion cub instead. He hissed and spit and struck fast at men easily twice his size, using that fact to his advantage as he rolled out of the way of one attempt at tackling him to the ground. Bounding to his feet, Aiden twisted his body into a roundhouse kick that hit its mark against one man’s solar plexus, knocking the breath from a muscular tree trunk of a human, before he carried his momentum into a serpent strike against the next man’s throat. At some point a gun had come into play, muzzle glinting under the sunlight that burned down on them from the rooftops, but Aiden sent it sailing promptly in a disarming move that had everyone confused, and that Nigel’s brows raising in appraisal.

Yawning and stretching stiff limbs, the wolf inside him scented the air, and with a great, full-body shake, it tossed aside the remnants of the shackles of boredom tying it down, and then Nigel was prowling forward with a smirk that showed his teeth, and growl that met the air with ferocity as he joined the fray. He crushed a wrist in his grasp, and the knife that had slipped out of a sleeve clattered to the street as the man called out in pain and surprise. And Aiden, having proven himself not to be a helpless babe, whipped around and adopted a ready stance as he took in the scene before him.

“You gave him your back,” Nigel informed the young man. “He was about to open you up like a fish.”

“He would have missed,” Aiden assured the wolf with a panting grin. “But thanks.”

Nigel huffed a short laugh as he shoved the man in his grasp away from him, only watching him sail ass over teakettle from the corner of his eye. He found his attention too preoccupied with the split lip and the blood oozing out of it as Aiden relaxed his stance and blinked up at him owlishly from under brown curls. The three man scattered with harsh breaths and threatening shouts from the distance, promising a return in the future. For their efforts, Aiden merely shouted after them challengingly, pursuing them a short distance and jumping in place as he enthusiastically waved a middle finger at their retreating backs.

Nigel remained standing where the brief skirmish had taken place, the after image of blue eyes shining up at him with exuberance burned into his retinas. Tiny and pink but with claws and teeth, he amended thoughtfully.

Not a lion cub, either. A wolf, Nigel wanted to say.

∞

Three weeks passed by like a snail, oozing long and hot at the heart of summer, Bucharest alight with gleaming ivory towers and close-packed rows upon rows of old buildings, ancient churches and crumbling historic monuments. The city was a maze and it was never, ever asleep. There was a wildness here that Nigel felt in his veins, and he knew he wouldn’t leave no matter how many times he had been to the same club, sauntered down the familiar alleys, sat at his cafe as he nursed a barely-there hangover that was more stiffness from his lack of activity. Well, other than the sparse hunts or the nights spent consuming chemicals at an inhuman pace, or the ones spent shaking his hair out as he pounded his feet to the music thumping through the club.

Two of those three weeks, Aiden was absent. It was another week before Nigel grew impatient enough to look for him, his scent familiar and hot, like spices added to the sweetness of the chocolate beverage red lips drank so often. The lack of that and the mess of art things had Nigel’s stomach twisting, not in fear or any emotion he could aptly name. He figured it had to do with the fact that he was finally no longer bored, that that day in the alleyway had awoken in him a need to seek out the young artist for the way the air veritably sizzled between them like a heatwave. Nigel didn’t simper and he didn’t miss Aiden, but he felt his absence in a wholly different, innate way.

Nigel picked up Aiden’s scent at the cafe and followed it down streets, through alleyways, across rooftops when he grew impatient, moving faster than the human eye could ascertain even in broad daylight. He was careful, yes, but the city was a wild maze and its inhabitants lived their own lives to the fullest, selfish and entirely uncaring. And eventually Nigel looked up at a flat miles away from the cafe, housed in a dingy building sat squat on a streetcorner. Aiden wasn’t home, but this was very obviously his place, and the wolf slipped through a window uncaringly to rifle through meager belongings. A table, here, with dozens of finished drawings and paintings, tins full to the brim of various implements. The living room had a ratty couch, a coffee table, and a chair that had seen better years, and the kitchen was spotless and bare save for the jug of milk in the fridge and the box of sugary cereal in one cupboard. His bedroom had a rickety frame housing a mattress that was probably the only thing in the entire flat that wasn’t stained or torn, and it was here that Nigel found himself now.

A duffel bag sat on the floor half spilling its contents. Nigel’s gleaming shoes clicked on hardwood as he sauntered closer to it, bent to wrap long fingers around a red suit jacket, the fabric smooth and well worn. He brought it up to his nose and inhaled the scent, more potent this way, even though it filled the flat he had invaded. Bittersweet like swiss dark chocolate, less spice now that the wolf had time to take it in more succinctly. That night when Aiden returned, nothing was amiss, and the young man fell into bed amidst a cloud of drunken fatigue while a beast sat on the roof above him, hair stirring in a breeze, eyes closed as the moon and the city basked him in light.

Nigel was no longer interested in Aiden. Rather, he was entirely engrossed in the doe-eyed artist who rolled himself into his blankets below, a quiet moan wafting out of the open window as his sleep grew troubled.

And the next time Aiden sat at the cafe with his messenger bag and his hot chocolate, it was Nigel who sprawled into the chair across from him, setting his coffee and his lighter and his pack of smokes on the table wordlessly, abandoning his own corner without a second thought. Aiden paused with the paper cup set against his lips, eyeing Nigel with a shit-eating grin that the wolf found himself almost preening under instinctively.

“I want to see the drawing,” Nigel said without preamble. “All of them.”

And there were more than one, which Aiden had the grace to blush gently at as he pulled a small stack of papers out from a plastic sleeve. He presented them without a word and sipped at his beverage coyly as Nigel flipped through images of himself in repose, the likeness in every single one so realistic that the wolf could almost imagine that he was looking into a mirror. Again, he wondered how long the young man had been frequenting this cafe, and it became easy for him to picture Aiden spotting him one day under a ray of startling sunlight that brought the browns and blonds of his hair into startling brightness, as one picture depicted. Or the other one, Nigel’s favorite, sketched from somewhere out of his line of sight as he glared down at his table, and he looked down at his profile with a pleased rumble in his belly.

“You’re graceful in your stillness,” Aiden whispered. “When I first saw you I thought I was looking at a statue. The first time I drew you I was afraid you’d notice, but you didn’t even so much as twitch.”

“Why bother fucking asking my permission then, I wonder,” Nigel mused aloud, feigning annoyance as he glared up at the young man.

“I wanted to get closer,” Aiden shrugged. “More than that, I wanted to see you move more. Every time I watched you, you only ever seemed to when I blinked or looked away.”

“So you sit there and fucking watch me often?” and Nigel was pleased despite his gruff tone.

“I did. I do,” Aiden’s smile was unabashed and full of white teeth.

Nigel’s nostrils flared as his body tightened pleasantly. He found himself wanting for something just then, as they sat across from each other. A deep-seated feeling that took him a while to recognize for what it was, but by then it was late into the night, Aiden a long-gone echo after they parted ways with few words between them -less needed, but comfortable in its simplicity. And by that point Nigel was on his eighth shot and had snorted a line of cocaine offered by the owner and friend of his favorite club and second home, a loup-garoux safe-place tucked into a partially underground warehouse. By then, Nigel’s hands were buried in the long, curled locks of a woman undulating against him wearing a little black dress that left nothing to the imagination. And later that evening, cock buried between quivering, sweaty legs, and hands squeezing and and kneading pert tits, Nigel realized exactly what that unnamed _something_ had been.

His mind offered up startling flashes of Aiden spread bare before him instead of the nameless woman, and it was Aiden’s thighs that wrapped around his waist as he sunk deeper into wet warmth.

It was Aiden’s lips he devoured in his mind’s eye, and it was Aiden who cried out as he climaxed around Nigel in spasming, little jolts and quiet breathy moans.

__∞_ _

__“__ I don’t know your name,” Aiden commented the next day.

They were seated at Nigel’s table today, the artist seeking him out like beacon, and the wolf had smelled him long before he had sat down with a gentle _oof_ and a shifting of clothes and messenger bag and limbs. He wore his red suit jacket over a beige t-shirt and dust-covered black jeans. His curls were mussed from sleep, which Nigel could still smell on his breath, along with the cheap booze and the marijuana that still permeated from the young man in a cloying sticky scent that made the wolf want to sneeze. Aiden spent his nights much the same as Nigel, it seemed, though in far less an open atmosphere, sticking instead to dimly lit corners as he hopped from bar to bar, not as shy as he could seem with his boyish face and his gentle voice.

“That’s because I never fucking told you,” Nigel said with a smirk as he lit up a ciggie and licking his bottom lip.

“You could be polite and tell me now,” Aiden answered the smirk with a grin and a wink as he rested his jaw against one hand and tapped his fingers on the table with the other.

“Or I could not, and you could just fuck off,” the wolf growled.

Surprisingly, Aiden stood and walked off without a word, but he returned barely ten seconds later, circling a small crowd of teenagers and pretending to look at a watch that didn’t exist. When he fell back into the chair adjacent to Nigel, his blue eyes veritably glittered with amusement.

“I fucked off,” he helpfully informed. “How about now?”

“You’re a fucking brat,” was all Nigel said.

But he relented and muttered ‘Nigel’, watched as Aiden took that in and matched it to the face he had sketched and inked and colored and perused. Observed as the young man matched it to the elegant nose with the tiny scar on the bridge of it, to the high and sharp cheekbones and the wide jawline, the bowing full lips and the deep-set and heavily lidded brown eyes. Nigel felt his scrutiny like a physical weight, like feathers stroking over him tentatively but intentionally, and he didn’t shrink away from it whatsoever. He didn’t look away as Aiden leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs under the table, and neither of them looked away as Nigel resolutely nudged his foot against the artist’s, shoe pressing against his ankle so gently and so swiftly as to have been an accident.

“You love it,” Aiden whispered breathily.

Nigel really fucking did. But all he did was exhale smoke from his nostrils, flick ashes into the tray between them, and observe the creature from behind his customary vaporous veil. The loup-garoux had grown accustomed to the bond that had developed and grown taut between them, the invisible threads binding them together as the wolf prowled ceaselessly and circled his prey, small and pink and human, but not helpless and certainly not stupid. Aiden knew on some level that he was being cornered and herded, and Nigel really fucking loved that too. He loved the flashes of blue he could see around pupils blown wide as boyish cheeks blushed, and the way the artist’s entire body thrummed with the same _something_ that Nigel’s had the previous night.

Taking a sip of his cooling coffee, Nigel finally bared his own sharp teeth in an answering cheeky grin.


End file.
